‘Perhaps it was jetlag that kept Boris Johnson on the phone to Russian pranksters he thought were the Armenian PM for 18 minutes before ending the call.’
Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters

Occasionally it feels like metaphors are our last great manufacturing industry. On Tuesday Theresa May visited the Chelsea Flower Show, where she was shown a cowpat, which she pronounced “wonderful”. Cow shit means cow shit, and I guess the cow had made a success of it. Even so, the prime minister’s insistence on being ludicrously positive about literally any old doodah is surely nearing its endgame.

Meanwhile, news that Britain may be frozen out of the EU’s £10bn Galileo satellite navigation system has opened a whole other vista of magical thinking, this time stretching all the way into orbit. Chancellor Philip Hammond – who has the sort of cabinet presence that might be expected of someone in one of the better witness protection programmes – has broken cover to retort that we will just build our own rival system if we’re to be shut out. Like me, you may well have had no idea we were so rich, particularly in the week the Institute for Fiscal Studies released a report stating that the NHS needed an additional £2,000 in tax from every UK household just to stay afloat. But we’re forgetting the legendary referendum slogan: “Let’s spend ten billion quid on a satnav for this bus instead.”

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Considering the bailiffs are almost at the ward door, then, we seem to be feeling oddly flush. This week found Boris Johnson in South America on some mission or other, doing ironicidal things like opening a new Bupa hospital in Santiago. Absolutely super news for the Chilean elite, and anyone whingeing about plans to close their own local hospital needs to stop talking down Global Britain.

In the meantime, do think of Boris’s overseas tours as the equivalent of No 10 saying “I’ll time you” to the foreign secretary, as you might to a child you’d very much like to run along and get out of your hair. He doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to the ruse yet, but it’s possible the globetrotting is beginning to take its toll. He told journalists on Tuesday that he needed a private Foreign Office plane, as the prime minister’s one was “grey” and “seems to be very difficult to get hold of”. Also, a snazzy new jet could help strike trade deals.

Wait, I thought Brexit needed a new boat? Specifically, a new royal yacht – although I get the feeling it could also be a Sunseeker. Or a kiteboard. Or a Ducati Panigale V4. You’ve heard of a soft Brexit and a hard Brexit and a clean Brexit and a jobs-first Brexit – and yet, at some base emotional level, I think we always knew we were going to get a Paul Hollywood Brexit. On the morning after the referendum vote, JK Rowling observed that Brexiteers are “like the cheating man shocked he can’t stay in the spare room for two years while he sorts himself out”. Nearly two years later and … well, here we are, not even at the midlife of the crisis.

Still, the foreign secretary reckons a plane will do it – call it Air Foff One – and who are we to question his needs? Perhaps it was jetlag that kept Boris on the phone to Russian pranksters he thought were the Armenian PM for 18 minutes before ending the call. The foreign secretary discussed the Skripal poisonings and more with the pair – only for the foreign office minister Alan Duncan to conclude it was Vladimir Putin left with egg all over his face. “If this was an attempt to ridicule us,” judged Alan, “it has totally backfired. All it has done is make the Russians look even sillier than we knew they were.” You tell ’em, Alan.

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He’s far from the only one on the defensive, of course. And so to Vote Leave’s mastermind, Dominic Cummings, who has broken another silence to unleash a couple of furious drive-bys about how Brexit is being done wrong, and to refuse to appear before a select committee. Like many unintentionally comic movie masterminds, Dominic is the guy whose every point is essentially: “WHY AM I SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS?”

I’ve lost count of how many of his 20,000-word facepalms I’ve read, but it’s fairly clear there has been some sort of acute henchmen crisis ever since the referendum vote. You really can’t get the staff these days, and as a result Cummings’ brilliant and beautiful secret plan has been ruined – ruined, I tell you! – by junior personnel such as the prime minister, the cabinet and the entire senior civil service.

Or, if you prefer a different sort of movie analogy, we are now at the point in the heist-gone-wrong where the accusations are beginning to fly among the co-conspirators. Someone set them up. Someone’s a rat. Someone killed people when the express rule was no killing. Often in these movies, someone gets greedy, so they cock up the plan by staying too long in the vault. In this case, Theresa May didn’t stay long enough, triggering article 50 before she needed to.

How will it end? When will it end? Not for years and years, is the conservative – though not the Conservative – answer. David Cameron promised the referendum would “settle the issue for a generation”; instead ministers will be able to handle little else but its fallout for a generation.

Sunlit uplands? Even younger politicians are beginning to see that they could well be getting their second hip replacement at the Bupa hospital in Santiago before those heave thrillingly into view.